BKeeney Briefs

Kindle schmindle.  Despite the hype I still like my Sony eReader.

I’ve written before that I had a Sony eReader and for the most part I’ve enjoyed it.  I decided to upgrade and I went from the first generation PRS-500 to the PRS-505.  I seriously thought about getting the PRS-700 since it has a touchscreen interface and is backlit, but it’s also $150 more expensive and the contrast ratio on the E-INK wasn’t a good as 505.

I really like the PRS-505 though.  It’s E-INK contrast is better and much more responsive than the original.  The button placement makes a whole lot more sense and when reading it ‘feels’ like your holding a book.  With the 500 the back/forward buttons were both on the same side of the unit and were in the wrong spot so my thumbs used to get sore.  The 505′s buttons are in a much more natural position and in particular the right side buttons are almost perfect.

I say almost perfect because the next page button is right next to the 7 menu button and I occasionally hit it.  The buttons are raised but they reside on the curved bevel and this makes me wish they were a bit larger and/or raised more.  Thankfully the unit is smart enough to not go to the menu and simply hitting the menu button goes back to where you’re reading.

Also, the 505 puts the power button on the top as well as the SD expansion slots and the volumn buttons are on the bottom of the unit.  On the 500 all of those buttons were on the left side and were just in an awkward spot.  If you happened to have the Cover Light it would seriously interfere with those function.

The Cover Light unit was a good news/bad news scenario for me.  The good news is that I can now read in bed without having my wife ask me when I’m going to go to bed.  The bad news is that I read a LOT later because reading a good story keeps me awake.  The cover light is clear plastic screen the swings around to cover the eReader screen and when lit up, the edges provide the illumination.  It does a decent job of illuminating the text.  It’s not perfect but good enough for darkened rooms.  Durring daylight hours the cover light is a kind of a pain but not horribly so.  The cover light unit is an additional $50 and is pretty pricey for what it does in my opinion.

The eReader software is how you load books on to your eReader.  It is still Windows only and still very simplistic and in my opinion the weakest part of the whole Sony eReader system.  There is no auto syncing of the books and the eReader.  There is no meta data available so there’s no way to distinguish between read and not read books unless you manually sort them yourself (which is a big deal when you start to have several hundred books in your library).  There’s also no additional information like series title, sequence in the series or any of the little things you expect from an online store.

Some could argue (successfully I might add) that the eBook software is also its strength.  You can read any book on the screen and this may or may not be appealing.  A friend of mine whose eReader died on a business trip was still able to read the book he was on because he had it on his laptop.  However, there is no smart syncing between the eReader and the software so if you’ve been reading on one the other device won’t know about it.

The Sony store appears to be a bit more expensive (20 to 30%) than the equivalent book in the Amazon Kindle store.  The Sony store doesn’t have nearly as many titles either so you might want to check out the genre you like to read in both stores.  Since I’m a huge science fiction fan I’ve been discovering some new authors at Baen’s Webscription website with hundreds of books at reasonable prices including some free ones (be forewarned that a lot of the free ones are the first book in a series which I think it a brilliant move to get avid readers hooked!)

A few other thoughts:  The eReader plays music.  Who cares?  I have my iPhone/iPod.  You can put pictures on it.  Really?!  Again, I have a COLOR display on my iPhone/iPod and 16 shades of grey is an awful substitute.  I think the music and picture capabilities are pretty pointless for most folks but I suppose someone might like them.

Windows only?  Puhlease!  Sony, get off your collective butts and make a Macintosh version.  It’s not that hard – really!  Find yourself a good cross-platform developer and just do it.  I happen to know a few *cough* BKeeney Software *cough* that might be able to help.

We’ve converted all of the old posts over to the new format except where, in a few cases, there were graphics in the original post.  In that case we’ve linked to the old posts.  We’re going to leave the old posts around because of the considerable amount of comments people have given over the years.  Also, some links didn’t come across so it’s just easier to leave everything up.

Thanks for reading and giving your comments!

The import of the old Brief’s didn’t go nearly as well as we had hoped.  We’ll start filling in the missing entries as time goes on.

Also, sorry for all the Twitter posts, didn’t think the import would do that.

I’m a Mac user.  I have been since 1986 and even in my electrical engineering days I always had a Mac at home while I slaved away on a Windows machine at work.  Get over it.

I think it’s time to move on though.  Windows XP has such lousy performance with threading that I’m almost tempted to pull support of XP for one of my apps that uses a lot of threads.  What’s taking mere minutes in Vista (and half that time in Mac OS X!) to complete is taking a whole lot more minutes under XP.  Both environments are running in VMWare with the same allotted RAM and running on the same drive with nothing else on the Mac running.

As much as I hate the UI changes (I can’t give specific’s it just feels slightly off-kilter!) the performance increase is enough for me to start using it more and more.  XP, I’m kicking you to the curb for good I think.  I’ll still use you to kick the tires on app testing but no more of your crappy performance.

Estimates aren’t very easy.  In fact, I’d say that it’s the hardest part of being a consultant because of the time and effort that goes into making a decent estimate.  It’s really just an educated guess.

Think about it for a second.  You’re being asked to figure out how much time and money it will take do something without actually doing the work.  And in most cases a client has given you a vague, rough idea of what they want.  If you’re lucky.

If you’re unlucky, the client has an OPC (Other Peoples Code) project that they’re bringing to you to fix.  What’s even worse, they give you a paragraph of what the application does, with no specifics, and expect it to be done quickly and cheaply and correctly.

The other thing that sucks about estimates is knowing that we humans are notoriously bad at determining how much time something will take.  We’re good at estimating a lot of things but time estimates are ephemeral at best.  I started my career as an electrical engineering doing project engineering work.  It only took a few small projects (and getting chewed out when my estimates were horrible) to realize that my ‘it only takes a day to do that’ estimate turned into three days (or more).

So I have my multiply by three rule.  Take your estimate, which is really the ‘if everything works perfectly the first time and I can devote 100% of my day to it’ estimate and then multiply by your reality factor.

The real trick is learning from your past successes and mistakes.  Now that I have a standard tool set of classes, controls and modules that I’ve used on a dozens of projects it’s easy to say that adding ‘X’ is 15 minutes worth of work and the reality factor is 1.5.  Creating new controls, since it has a high degree of initial failure, might have a reality factor of 2 to 3.  If you have a feeling that a client is going to be really picky, maybe that reality factor goes up a little.  If the project requirement details are scarce the factor goes up again.

Trust your gut on this one folks.  The figure at the bottom of the spreadsheet seems high sometimes.  You’ll be tempted to lower some estimates to make it more palatable to the client.  Sometimes you might have to do that to get the job, but try to resist the temptation.  As a consultant your pricing is based on what your time and experience are worth along with all the other things that go into being a business.  You have overhead, marketing, taxes, insurance, and you have a retirement plan, right?

So what’s your Reality Factor?

Consulting or applications.  It’s my eternal struggle with my business.  Consulting pays the bills but products are…well, this seems silly… a little part of me.  With consulting projects you always know they’re not yours and so you don’t have nearly as much invested in them.  Your products have history and baggage and all the good, bad and ugly that goes into products.

Today we released Task Timer version 4.1.  It has some nifty new features for Mac OS X users including the ability to start/stop timers from the menubar (even when it’s not at the forefront) and from the dock menu.  We also added some charting capabilities so that it’s easy to tell if you’re spending too much time on a project (or product).  Sometimes this is good, sometimes it’s bad to know all this.

Task Timer was our very first product.  Written initially in the REALbasic 5.5 era.  The database it used back then was horrible.  If the app crashed while the db was open it was hosed and the only way to fix it was to use a utility to fix it.  Another version came out when RS change the database format and yet another version came out when it finally became SQLite based.

With version 4 we did a complete rewrite from the ground up.  It needed it.  I’ve learned a few things about REALbasic since then and there are some much better controls available.  Reporting was another big thing in version 4.  We went from using a StyleGrid printer to using RSReport.  Trust me, RSReport is light years ahead of what we were doing before.  In the 4.1 version we added charting which was pretty easy to do using the MonkeyBread ChartDirector plugin.  Both 3rd party items are welcome additions into the BKeeney Software stable of tools.

If you try any of the BKeeney Software products I talked about above and want to purchase, please use the coupon code BRIEFS to get a 25% discount off the purchase price! The coupon is good through July 1, 2009.

This one comes up on the RB Forums a lot.  The post generally goes something like this:  “I have a database and everything works fine until here <insert code snippet> and I get a Nil Object Exception because rs is nil.”

If everything else is working fine then it must be the recordset.  If you’re not checking the database for an error you’ll never know!  The db.error property tells you that you had an error and the db.errormessage property does a pretty good job of telling you what the error is.

dim rs as recordset
rs = db.SQLSelect(“SELECT * FROM sometable WHERE somefield=avalue”)
if db.error then
msgbox “Error!” + db.ErrorMessage
return
end

//do something with the recordset here.

I find this happens a lot with developers that came from Visual Basic 6 where database errors throw an exception.  REALbasic doesn’t work the same way.  Get over it and start checking for database errors.

If you want to capture database errors you can do something like what we’ve done:

if gDB.Error then Raise new BK_Debug.BK_DatabaseException(gDB.ErrorMessage, s)

Where BK_DatabaseException is a RuntimeException subclass defined like this:

Sub Constructor(sMessage as string, sSQL as string)
If sMessage <> “” Then
Me.Message = sMessage
End If

If sSQL <> “” Then
Me.Message = Me.Message + EndOfLine +  EndOfLine + sSQL
End
End Sub

This can be useful if you have automated error handling and can receive this information.  Of course, if you’re creating a runtime exception you had better be handling them in the app.unhandledexception event otherwise your app will shutdown and you’ll have pissed off users.

Anyone know of a WordPress plugin that allows me to insert RB code into my posts and make it look like it’s supposed to?

I spend most of my time using REALbasic in Mac OS X.  About the only thing I ever need to do in Windows is test applications and using the Remote Debugger works fine for that. Unfortunately, one of my projects is requiring a bit more coding work than is reasonable using the Remote Debugger.

So this morning I started up VMWare and installed REAL Studio (since I figured, hey, I ponied up the money for it I might as well use it) and either copied or redownloaded all of my plugins.  And then started RB for Windows.

I must say that it’s…um…not nearly as pleasant as working in Mac OS X.  The UI doesn’t refresh properly, it responds somewhat sluggishly and in general it just seems a bit ‘spastic’.  After I bumped my VMWare memory up to over 2 GB it was better but it still wasn’t hard to get the UI to erase itself and stay erased for 10 to 15 seconds.

My app uses a number of threads to increase performance in Mac OS X and it sure seems like the threads are slowing DOWN my performance in Windows.  Is this a common problem?  I’m really starting to wonder if I need to spend more time running RB in Windows to really understand what the Windows ‘experience’ is.  I’m also wondering if there’s a significant difference between Windows XP and Vista (and Windows 7 by extension).

Is it time for RS to really get serious about Windows after they get done with Cocoa?  Do you have any tricks for increasing performance of REALbasic for Windows?  Are you seeing the same sort of issues?

I’ve been using RapidWeaver for a few years I’m been fairly satisfied with it.  It was fast enough when I had 20 posts, okay when I had 75, slow when I had 100 and now that I have over 150 posts it’s just downright slow.  Every time I upload a new post I  go use the restroom, surf the web, answer some emails and then it’ll be done.  Not exactly a speedy process.  Plus, it requires that I have my entire website with me whenever I need to update it.

A friend asked me about blogging software so this is the opportunity to take a look at WordPress.  In many respects it seems to be a simplified Joomla!, a popular content management system, which we’ve used on a number of sites.  I’m now a big fan of CMS because it makes managing websites so much easier and simpler.

So here’s my list of things to do:

a)  Look at alternative themes so it’s not the default WordPress look and feel.  (Done?  I’m not sure I’m happy with it yet but that’s one of the things I like about CMS – you can change it whenever with little hassle!)

b)  How easy is it to move from the test directory to the regular one?  (If you’re reading this it’s done!)

c)  Is there a way to export from my old blogging software to the new one or should I just start over again?  I’d hate to lose all those posts and the awesome comments people have given over the years.  (See the link at the top of the page).

d)  How bad will the spam be?  (Do you suggest any plugins?)

All of the old posts are here:  http://www.bkeeneybriefs.com/Old_Posts/index.html

As always, your comments are most welcome!